Success Story: National Telecom Provider

The Challenge

Companies of any size are seeing the benefits (and necessities) of transforming their business to be more customer centric through self-service. This is especially true when it comes to mobile device providers. Smartphones and tablets are more than just devices for most consumers, they have become essential every day tools. Mobile users want to communicate and find information anytime, anywhere – with minimal interruptions.

TechBlocks recently began working with one of the largest telecommunications providers in Canada, one that recognized the need to become more customer centric. Due to growth and increased competition, this company desired to enhance its customer experience across multiple channels and devices while reducing operational costs in it’s small-to-medium business division. They wanted to achieve this by implanting a self-serve strategy, and that’s where TechBlocks’s technical, creative and design experience came in.

In order to make this strategy work from a customer experience standpoint, TechBlocks recognized that the company first needed to fix their fragmented web presence and update old technology. This would be a Herculean task because of the conflicting goals between business departments and stakeholders combined with the uncertainty around the firm’s new products and services.

The company previously began building a self-serve strategy but were not successful because they:

Failed to understand evolving business needs and did not take an agile approach for capturing requirements

Focused too much on technology implementation instead of on the end user (customer) experience and business needs

Spent time writing long, confusing reports rather than using visually rich and easy-to-read graphical representations

Lacked end-to-end vision and focused solely only on building the strategy, while ignoring practical challenges in implementation and rollout stages

TechBlocks Solution

After receiving a referral from the Koodo team (a happy TechBlocks customer), the telecom provider reached out to TechBlocks to help them clearly define a successful end-to-end web self-serve strategy. TechBlocks brought in a team of consultants and creative designers for a six-week engagement to help the company achieve its goals.

During this period TechBlocks acted as the glue between different business groups at the provider by conducting workshops that would bring stakeholders together to define cohesive goals and objectives. The TechBlocks team worked to engage these business groups – such as the product team, customer service team, etc. – in storyboarding sessions with the goal of capturing requirements and then worked with the technical teams to come up with feasible technical solutions.

TechBlocks helped bring the firm’s vision to life by:

Setting up project kick-off meetings to clearly define the plan of assessment in agreement with stakeholders from different business groups

Exploring and defining goals, objectives, and benefits for each business group and aligning strategic interests towards the assessment sessions

Gaining buy-in from business groups with commitment to attend meetings and workshops; booked their calendars and took care of logistics in advance

Providing a comprehensive explanation of the assessment process, its deliverables and post-assessment next steps to bring a comfort level to stakeholders

Based on market research and available customer research data, defining user personas and creating user scenarios throughout the self-serve site

Conducting workshops with business groups for story boarding and defining requirements

Conducting workshops with technical teams for mapping requirements to technical solutions and legacy system integration

Providing an easy-to-read visual representation of feature release dates instead of having pages and pages of documentation

Conducting sessions to walk business groups through the typical user journey and made adjustments as per their feedback

Writing detailed user stories and validation criteria that could be directly used for the development phase which significantly accelerated the timeline and decreased costs.

Conducting interviews and meetings with independent service providers and vendors to map out third party application integration details

Mapping features on the self-serve roadmap to site map in order to define specific functionalities (see sample below)

Results Achieved

In the end, TechBlocks was able to provide this leading Canadian telecom company with a well-defined roadmap for their self-serve strategy that was aligned with the strategic needs of business groups and stakeholders. And most importantly, it guided them on a customer-centric approach. All of this was achieved in a fraction of time and price that the company originally budgeted, making them an extremely happy customer.

The clearly defined solution architecture, deliverables, timeline, and cost helped them to see the bigger picture and gain the confidence they needed to move forward to the next stage of implementing their customer-centric strategy.